Le Pere Goriot

Rating:
Summary: "I Am in Hell, and I Have To Stay There."
Review: Honoré de Balzac's 1834 novel, "Le Père Goriot," is a novel of strange and fascinating power. As the doorway into his interconnected cycle, La Comédie Humaine, it presents as much welcome to interested readers as Dante's fateful "abandon all hope..." entrance to Hell in the Divine Comedy. "Le Père Goriot" gives us a fallen world, driven by self-interest, where all ties of genuine human feeling seem to be relegated to a no longer existent past, or to the rarely-glimpsed pastoral countryside. Balzac presents the stories of Eugène de Rastignac - a young law student from the southern provinces, Jean-Joachim Goriot - a former pasta merchant who gave all he had as dowry for his two daughters, and Vautrin - a man who lives and works in shadows. Balzac's novel illustrates the lengths and depths that these three, and everyone around them, go to in order to secure even the most fleeting happiness in the moral wasteland of Paris about 4 years after the fall of Napoleon.

The novel begins with our introduction to Maison Vauquer, a boarding house with a crumbling plaster statue of Cupid in the yard, which is home and prison to the respectably indigent. Goriot has lived in the Maison Vauquer under the increasingly unsympathetic gaze of Madame Vauquer and her boarders for almost 10 years - wasting away, Goriot has become a figure of fun for the house, coming to be known teasingly as "Old Goriot." His tragic affection for his two well-married daughters, Delphine de Nucingen and Anastasie de Restaud, has driven him out of their homes, and into a state wherein his only joys come from seeing them from afar, and mortgaging what remains of his fortune to assist them in financial difficulties. Into the Maison and Goriot's life comes young Rastignac, whose lack of fortune fuels his desire to enter the fashionable world of Parisian high society. Here, Rastignac meets Vautrin, who offers the youth a possible means to do so - means both underhanded and deadly.

One of the novel's great questions is the great Biblical dilemma - what does it profit a man to gain the world if he must lose his soul in the process? The novel's three main characters, but particularly Rastignac, illustrate the dilemma from different vantage points. For Vautrin and Goriot, their choices were made long ago, and Balzac's work with them concerns the results of lives organized around self and others, respectively. The novel's primary concern is with Rastignac, who is continually in the process of weighing his options - in a world in which there is little grey area, will Rastignac opt for a life of good or evil, of self-interest (as with fellow-boarders Mlle. Michonneau and M. Poiret) or service (as with fellow-student Bianchon)?

Balzac sets relationships, particularly those concerned with family, up for consideration in the novel. We see bonds created by birth, as well as by social class and wealth; of course, family and money are rarely inseparable, and certainly are not mutually exclusive for the novel's characters. Rastignac is in Paris studying the law only because of the financial sacrifices being made by his family in the country. Rastignac's kinship with Madame de Beauséant provides him with a taste of the seeming luxury of Paris. Victorine de Taillefer, a motherless young girl at the Maison Vauquer, makes a fruitless yearly application to her hard-hearted father, who has disowned her completely. As Rastignac interacts with and becomes part of Goriot's life and that of his fellow-boarders, we are encouraged to consider the role of the family as it relates to society. If family is Balzac's basic social unit, then how do we regard the family constituted by Goriot and his daughters? The one made up of the "guests" of the boarding house? That of Vautrin's Ten Thousand Society?

I have barely scratched the surface of Balzac's novel. Its engagements - literary, sociological, and moral, are extensive. Balzac's engagements with literary and philosophical models, from Shakespeare to Rousseau, are worth taking notice of, as are his proposed "three attitudes of men toward the world: obedience, struggle, and revolt." For a novel with seemingly clear moral polarities, it is difficult to say who are the heroes and who the villains in "Le Père Goriot." Though the novel is by no means a simple satire, getting swept up in the novel's overt sentimentality may say as much about the reader as it does about the novel's characters and situations. Balzac's anonymous narrator offers continually biased judgments, which can cloud the reader's ability to remain objective. Any way one reads it, "Le Père Goriot" is a terrific novel - and the invitation to enter Balzac's uninviting world is well worth accepting.

Rating:
Summary: Sharper than a serpent's tooth...
Review: I would preface my remarks by urging the reader with any command of the French language to read this book in the original, if necessary with Balzac's text side by side with the translation. Reading 'Pere Goriot' in English (or any book in translation, for that matter) is like following the Atkins diet; one gets the meat, yes, but none of the sweetness.

Moreover I would urge the reader to remember that this is a novel like a beautiful and circumspect woman who gives herself gradually, tantalizingly, deliciously. Balzac's times are not ours, something perhaps to regret.

The place is Paris, and the year 1819; Eugene de Rastignac, a young man of the minor provincial nobility, has come to the great capital to make his fortune, straining his family's meager resources to do so. He has begun his studies at law and lodges at the Pension Vauquer. The Pension is a mean and shabby place but respectable, and seven other boarders live there in varying states of semi-genteel desperation. Eugene, good-hearted and idealistic, soon finds himself sympathetically involved in the life of the elderly widower Goriot, who was at one time a merchant of huge wealth, but has gradually impoverished himself installing his two cherished daughters in Parisian society. He now lives in miserable obscurity, selflessly and adoringly financing the extravagances necessary to women at the pinnacle of fashion.

In pitiless contrast to the greasy pettiness of the Pension Vauquer is the gleaming realm of the upper classes--two separate castes, the aristocrats by birth and the merely rich who strive ceaselessly to infiltrate the glittering orbit of the titled. It is a savage place beneath its urbane opulence, in its own way as desperate as the world of the Pension. There are some for whom the only power is the power to withold; and faced with the showy wealth of the nouveau riche, Paris' nobility uses its exclusivity of blood to the fullest. Goriot's elder daughter Anastasie has married into the aristocracy; her younger sister Delphine is fully as wealthy but not of the 'gratin.' The doors that are closed to Delphine the banker's wife open wide for the penniless but aristocratic Eugene; and the intimacy the two come to share is never free of a sense of mutual advantage.

Among such blighted souls, the character of Vautrin stands out in robust relief. This magnificent villain, one of the greatest figures in all of literature, is the book's mystery. No one knows why he chooses to live at the Pension; no one is aware that he is a key figure in the underworld of Paris. He is a burly bon vivant, charming, clever, possessed of a mesmerizing way with words. For Vautrin, the handsome and altruistic Eugene is an object of what can only be called adoration, and the older man puts into place machinations meant to provide the young nobleman with a rich and well-connected wife, supremely indifferent to the fact that Eugene is repulsed by both Vautrin and his criminal schemes.

The tragic figure of the tale is Goriot. He is Lear without Cordelia. His daughters are cajoling, bewitching vampires, remorselessly selfish, who would sooner attend a ball than sit by their father's deathbed. Eugene manages to inculcate some human feelings in Delphine, but he is a changed man by the book's end, at once shaken by the moral vacuum of Paris and infected with its cynicism.

Balzac's many masteries all find their fullest expression here. I have never yet been able to fathom why no one has made a film of this book.

Rating:
Summary: Money, Money, Money
Review: This is the first book I've ever read by Balzac, though first published more than 150 years ago, it goes to show how little human nature has changed, the theme here is greed, and some of the characters in this book stop at nothing in their pursuit of money.

The title character is Pere Goriot, an ex-pasta merchant with two daughters who are thoroughly spoiled and self centered; he gave all his money to them when they married in the hope that he would live with them and their rich husbands and be cared for in his old age. Instead his daughters refuse to even receive him in their homes, he has become only an object of shame and derision for them and lives on a pittance in a old boarding house, Maison Vauquer, run by the unforgettable Madame Vauquer, a widow of someone. The main character is Eugene de Rastignac, another boarder at la Maison, a honest (at least at the start) young man from the country whose loving family has toiled and saved to be able to send him to law school in Paris, he is brought into the company of the rich and famous, the creme de la creme of Parisian society and begins to think of another path for himself than the one laid out by his family. Almost everyone of the boarders is living for money, some more willing than others to do anything to obtain it.

As I was reading this I kept thinking of what a great stage play this would be, this is a true comic tragedy. It was a little difficult to get into a first, it is a translation and a very old book describing times now gone for good, for me it began to flow more easily after 50 or so pages. I think a modern day look too at Pere Goriot would not leave a reader feeling such pity for him because of his daughters' treatment. He became rich by hoarding food and waiting for a famine to make a financial killing off desperate people, then educated his daughters and brought them up to feel themselves to be ladies and superior to other people, I felt like he deserved a lot of what he got, Rastignac is the one I was more interested in.